Many places claim to be the capital of some product. For example, Fairview, Montana (which is also partly Fairview, North Dakota) claims to be the sugar beet capital of Montana and North Dakota. Enshi, a city in central China, has been called the "selenium capital" though it's not clear whether that's of the province, the nation, or the world (page 4 of this pdf from the Selenium-Tellurium Development Association, a Belgian enterprise).
A business problem recalled to me that Dalton, Georgia, in Whitfield County near the northwest corner of the state, claims to be the carpet capital of the world, and rightly so. Whitfield County has more than 150 carpet factories and more than 1000 carpet outlet stores. More than 30,000 people are employed in Whitfield County in making and selling carpets. This is an astounding figure: the county has only 90,000 residents. To put it on scale, it's as if more than 200,000 people in Multnomah County were employed in the same industry.
But as I read about Whitfield County, my eye was caught by a typo in the civic boosters' description of the carpet industry. "Dalton," the site says, "is truly a mica for for the technology that keeps the carpet world moving ahead."
Mica? Not "Mecca"? I can't decide if this is an inadvertent substitution of words -- maybe "mica" and "Mecca" sound the same in a deep Southern accent -- or if someone, intent on avoiding any reference to Arabic culture, substituted "mica" to avoid using "Mecca," along the lines of those who showed their displeasure with France by renaming their snack potatoes "freedom fries." Portlanders haven't been immune from that sort of xenophobia; for example, during one of our two disagreements with Germany in the last century, NW Germantown Road was renamed "Liberty Road," but we haven't as a rule deliberately mangled the name of any place except California.